Web Programming, Linux System Administation, and Entrepreneurship in Athens Georgia

The coolest, most efficient way to copy a directory between servers

I was recently quizzed about the quickest, most efficient way to copy an entire directory between servers. I typically do this by tar’ing it up on one server, copying it to the other, then extracting it. However, this has a couple obvious problems. One, is that it requires large chunks of disk space to hold the archive file on both the source and destination. If you are low on disk space, this can be a real pain. The other bad thing, is that it a waist of time since it reads through all of the files three times (read, copy, extract).

The original thought I had was to use “scp -r” which will recursively copy a directory over to the destination. This, however, doesn’t copy directories that start with a dot, and it doesn’t preserve file ownership information.

The best way, is to use a combination of tar and ssh. The idea is to tar the files up to STDOUT, then create an SSH session to the remote host, and extract from STDIN. After you’ve got the idea, the command is pretty simple: